Crops in silico is a mutli-disciplinary collaboration of several years amongst plant biologists and computer scientists to study the possibilities of simulating fully virtual crops as a means to speeding up the research into preventing global hunger. I have contributed in a variety of ways, including modeling soy plants from collected field data using a syntactic language called L-Systems.

These soy plant models were initially implemented in closed software, so I translated them into the open L-Py framework. I also implemented maize plants and investigated a root system simulation from Jonathan Lynch’s lab at Penn State.

Through my work with this project, my colleague Amy Marshall-Colón and I traveled to New York City in 2016 to deliver an address to the UN’s Global Open Data in Agriculture and Nutrition (GODAN) summit. We spoke in front of the USDA secretary and policy makers from around the world.